Highlights:
- Using RingCentral Contact Center’s skill-based routing, agents are developing areas of expertise, answering specific call queues, and resolving callers’ issues 30% faster.
- Department supervisors use Contact Center’s artificial intelligence capabilities, such as searching for flagged keywords and elevated tones on calls, to improve performance.
- The team uses RingCentral Video Happy Hour get-togethers to keep remote agents connected and feeling like a team, which directly benefits the team’s effectiveness.
America’s largest ear, nose, throat, allergy and audiology specialty provider
With an expert staff that includes over 300 otolaryngologists, immunologists, allergists, and other physicians—as well as 100 certified audiologists—ENT and Allergy Associates is the largest ear, nose, throat, allergy and audiology practice in the US. The multiple-award-winning provider sees more than 1,000,000 patients per year at one of its 44 clinical locations across New York and New Jersey.
But to continue providing an outstanding customer-support experience in an organization caring for such a large number of patients—a number that increases every year—ENT and Allergy’s call center department needed to begin adding some creative workflows that the company’s on-prem telephony system didn’t offer.
RingCentral Contact Center lets agents unlock serious skills
John Monreal, ENTA’s Senior Director of Purchasing and Call Center Operations, explains that the primary catalyst for the call center team’s move to RingCentral Contact Center was the need for sophisticated but intuitive skill-based routing.
With the department’s legacy phone system, John explains, “We were forced to send all calls through a central queue and hand them to the next available agent. We couldn’t create queues based on expertise in a specific subject or familiarity with a geographic area.”
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That all changed when John rolled out RingCentral Contact Center for ENTA’s 180 agents. Using the skill feature, John and the agents’ supervisors were able to group agents into topic- and region-specific call queues, allowing them to develop knowledge and expertise in those areas.
One example, he explains, was that rather than asking all agents to be ready to answer patients’ questions about any of the company’s clinical offices, John created queues just for the few locations in Northern New Jersey—where agent could become familiar with each office, its staff, and even the patients of those facilities who called in regularly.
As John points out, this significantly reduces the amount of time agents had to spend helping each caller. “Think about a typical scheduling call where the patient asks, ‘Hey, where’s the doctor’s office?’ or ‘What’s my doctor’s name?’ and the agent can provide those answers without having to search a directory. That can save so much time over the course of a day.”
In fact, John knows exactly how much time ENTA’s skill-based queues are saving the call center operation, because he’s crunched the department’s numbers pre- and post-RingCentral. “Our average call time was 5:59 before RingCentral Contact Center, before we could establish our agents as experts in specific call queues. Using Contact Center’s skill-based routing, it’s now 4:11. That’s a 30% time savings on every call.”
Improving team collaboration and job satisfaction with RingCentral Video
Nor is Contact Center the only RingCentral application that ENTA is using. The call center team has also found several innovative ways to use RingCentral Video, both to improve operations and to provide its hard-working staff some much-deserved relaxation.
In terms of operational improvements, John explains that the department has found several ways RingCentral Video helps them onboard the many new agents they’ve hired from all over the country since the COVID lockdowns began.“RingCentral Video is a great way to handle employee training, to do one-on-one coaching with new agents, and to help the team put faces to the names of the colleagues they chat with on their RingCentral Team Messaging platform.”
And as for helping the team enjoy each other as people, ENTA’s call center department has found another creative way to use the video conferencing platform.
“We’ve started hosting themed Happy Hours using RingCentral Video, where we have our agents—who are all remote now—get to know each other. The theme might be travel, and we’ll talk about places we want to visit, or it might be about our favorite foods or wines.”
The direct benefits of finding ways like this to bring the team closer together, John says, are unmistakable. “One day you’re on a RingCentral Video Happy Hour seeing your coworkers face-to-face. The next morning, you’re texting them a question through the RingCentral Team Messaging app. Now they know you, they’ve laughed with you, and they want to help you. That’s the power of this platform.”
Originally published Aug 24, 2021